Читать книгу This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City - John Rogers - Страница 7

I’d been coaxed into buying a copy of Walter George Bell’s Where London Sleeps by the sheer banality of its title. Surely a book that sounds so boring must be brilliant, as if it were a kind of code. Bell must have thought that if the title reflected the sizzling content inside the cloth-bound cover then readers would shy away for fear of overload. I’d suspected that the real action was out in the dormitory suburbs and now here would be the written proof.

Bell recognized that lying latent beneath the newly built suburbs of 1920s outer London there was a history as rich as that celebrated in the City and Westminster. He writes of monasteries in Merton, physic wells in Barnet, a world-famous Victorian astrophysicist in Tulse Hill and Jewish mysticism in Mile End. But it was the chapter on the highwaymen of Hounslow that captured my imagination.

Hounslow was not a place that resonated much within my psyche. It was a series of back gardens and rooftops that you passed through on the Piccadilly Line heading to and from Heathrow. A sketch show I wrote for and performed in used to rehearse above a pub on the High Street. A gloomy bunch of struggling comics and actors gathered once a week, attempting to master the art of savage satire too early on a Sunday morning, hungover, with nostrils saturated in the odour of last night’s stale beer and vomit. These were my only associations with Hounslow, but then I’d never been to the Heath.

You can pass through Hounslow today and not notice the Heath, reduced as it is to just over 200 acres, roughly a third of the size of the Square Mile of the City of London. But in the 17th century it was a vast and dangerous waste on the western edge of London spanning over 6,000 acres. ‘Time was when the heath seemed illimitable, stretching north and south across the old Bath Road far out towards the horizon,’ Bell tells us. To head west out of London towards Bath and Bristol meant a hazardous journey across this land that was so infested with highwaymen and footpads it was dubbed the most dangerous place in Britain. Compared with the level of crime in North Manchester, the current holder of that dubious honour, 17th- and 18th-century Hounslow Heath was more like Mogadishu.

On the rare occasions the highwaymen were apprehended a great show was made of their executions outside Newgate Prison, then their bodies were hung from gibbets that lined the Heath roads, ‘gallows fruit that ripened along their sides’, each rotting corpse marking your journey like zombie lampposts. Bell gives us a macabre vision of the scene that a Georgian traveller would have encountered: ‘Not unseldom a wind blew over the heath, sharpening at times to a gale, and then these grisly phantoms would take unto themselves movement, though denied life, swaying to the creaking of chains in a dreadful death dance.’

How could I not follow in Bell’s footsteps out to the badlands of the Wild West on Hounslow Heath?

***

Where London Sleeps was the inspiration, but short on the kind of detail I’d need for an exploration of the area. In my hunt for materials I found a battered old copy of Highwayman’s Heath by Gordon S. Maxwell, published by the Middlesex Chronicle in 1935.

Discovering Maxwell’s The Fringe of London (1925) had been an epiphany for me, realizing that there was some sort of heritage for this odd practice of wandering around neglected streets, following the city’s moods, tracking myths and retracing old paths. It’s somehow more acceptable to be engaged in an activity that pre-dates TV and jukeboxes. Just look at Morris dancing and basket weaving: nobody questions these, because your granny probably knew someone who did them (thankfully this doesn’t apply to marrying your cousin or cooking Starling Pie).

I’d worked out the simplest route to get within reasonable walking distance of the Heath – to skirt North London on the Overground train from Stratford to Gunnersbury and hoof it from there. But the territory between Gunnersbury and Hounslow Heath was completely unknown to me, aside from journeys along the A4 in my sister’s groaning white Vauxhall Cavalier as she ferried me back to polytechnic for the start of each term. So the 388 pages of Highwayman’s Heath were the topographical mother lode.

In common with the celebrated Victorian explorers of the Amazon Basin and the Central African Highlands, the old topographers had more than a touch of the eccentric about them. In the preface Maxwell explains the origins of his book:

One night I had a dream – a vision, if you will. I was on a vast heath stretching desolate and wild for miles. I was alone yet in the midst of a great company – of ghosts that moved as shadows around me. Not malevolent spectres, you understand, but vastly interesting, for in their dim outlines I recognized many famous in history, song and story.

This vision comes to him as he was sitting on Hounslow Heath one morning. He is approached by a group of maidens wearing white robes who tell him they are the ‘Nine Muses’. They scatter jewelled beads across the Heath, hand Maxwell a magic cord and instruct him to travel about the Heath threading the beads together, and that is the contents of the book, like a Middlesex Book of Mormon.

Armed with these potent images of the ripening gallows fruit and the magic cord threaded with the beads of history, I left Leytonstone one Saturday lunchtime. I’d put on a double pair of socks and strapped up my dodgy left knee, as Google Maps had informed me the route I’d plotted from Gunnersbury along the Great West Road, across Osterley Park, through Heston and down to Hounslow Heath would be around ten miles, and that was without the inevitable diversions and detours.

Since an arthroscopy I’d had performed on the knee in Homerton Hospital it had developed the annoying habit of ceasing to perform the basic function of a joint, bending, at almost bang on the eight-mile mark. It’s as accurate as a pedometer. From that point I’m swinging a useless leg-shaped post as if I’ve suddenly received a grant from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. This affliction has struck me down all over the London region, from a slip road beside the M40 near Beaconsfield to late night at the wrong end of Lea Bridge Road as I attempted to make it back to my local in time for last orders. It’s then that I reflect on Homerton Hospital’s reputation as the best place to be treated for gunshot wounds this side of a military hospital in Afghanistan. The most minor keyhole surgery probably lacked a certain jeopardy for the surgeons there.

On the packed Overground train I cram in a few more pages from Highwayman’s Heath and read about the old rural paths that led from Heston to Lampton, adding these to my itinerary. Arriving at Gunnersbury I start out in the direction of Gunnersbury Park, former home of mad King George III’s aunt, Princess Amelia, and later the Rothschild clan. As a tourist exploring foreign cities I’ve sought out palaces and grand houses as a reflex first resort, so why not do the same in the London Borough of Hounslow?

The traffic on Gunnersbury Avenue is bumper-to-bumper heading southwards but northbound you could skip down the white lines in perfect safety. There are allotments along the roadside with ramshackle sheds made from foraged materials that look as if they are left over from the wartime Dig for Victory effort. The sign for a salsa bar props up one end of a planter sprouting triffid-like weeds.

I pass above the traffic on a footbridge and enter the gates of Gunnersbury Park. One possible derivation of the name ‘Gunnersbury’ is from Gunnhild or Gunyld’s Manor, the niece of King Cnut. The Danes held lands in the area up to the time of the Battle of Brentford in 1016, when they were defeated by Edmund Ironside – how could he ever lose a battle with a name like that? Well, he did later on, and ended up having to divide his kingdom with the Danish.

From that point on the manor changed hands through various minor royals, merchants and bankers till it was finally handed back to the people in 1926, fittingly enough the year of the General Strike when the British establishment genuinely teetered on the brink of collapse. In the end it was the building of the Great West Road along the edge of the park that forced the aristocrats and bankers out of their city retreats, rather than a popular uprising.

Neville Chamberlain, then Minister for Health, presided over the grand public opening of the house and its grounds just a week after the strike had ended and Parliamentarians had returned to harrumphing at each other across the Westminster benches as if nothing had happened. There’s twenty-eight seconds of silent Pathé newsreel that capture the dignitaries lined up on the veranda above a huge crowd – ‘Another Lung for London’ the title declares.

When he was Prime Minister, Chamberlain passed through Gunnersbury again, on a more historically resonant occasion. In 1938 he flew from Heston Aerodrome, just a couple of miles away, to appease Hitler in Munich. Chamberlain pictured on the runway at Heston waving the treaty he’d signed with the Führer to a triumphant crowd is one of the enduring images of the 20th century, and it took place in a field that I’ll traverse later. As he made his way back into central London along the A4 did Chamberlain remember that May afternoon twelve years previously when he’d cut the ribbon at the house?

The exterior of the house now shows signs of neglect and decay. The white paint on the walls and wooden window frames is chipped and peeling. Buddleia sprouts from cracks in the foundations and crevices around the guttering and spills out of the chimney pots. Weeds flourish in a Grecian urn.

Gunnersbury Park House

Through grimy windows I can see sparse rooms furnished with trestle tables and moulded-plastic school chairs. What were the guest rooms of the Rothschild dynasty now host education workshops and talks by local community arts groups. On the veranda that boasted one of the finest views across the south of London out to the Surrey hills the only other person is a forlorn-looking bloke sucking on a can of lager where once royalty took tea. The intensity of the birdsong adds to the feeling of abandonment. I’m heartened by this first impression of Gunnersbury; I wasn’t in the mood to pay my respects to the gentility of former times.

The house now hosts the Ealing and Hounslow municipal museum. I drift about half-looking at the exhibits but mostly enjoying the current incarnation of this grand country residence as a council utility with its scuffed skirting boards and fire exit signs. In a room with gold-leaf trim around the ceiling and lit by a crystal chandelier there is an exhibition of children’s art mounted on free-standing boards that obscure the finery of the room. This could be the place where the antiquarian Horace Walpole was summoned to entertain Princess Amelia and commissioned to write verses for the Prince of Wales. There is little reverence for its former glories.

It’s a brief glimpse of what Britain might have looked like if the more radical elements of the General Strike had been successful. We could be going to Buckingham Palace to make a housing benefit claim, or you might be residing in a council flat in the converted Windsor Castle.

The revolution has yet to come, of course; we’re a nation still enthralled by monarchy, addicted to Downton Abbey and ruled by a government of privately educated millionaires. But there was something about this house that made me feel optimistic. Maybe it was the photocopied information sheets on sale in the gift shop for 20 pence each.

According to conspiracy theorists, this would have been the nerve centre of the shadowy Illuminati whom they believe were established by the Rothschild banking family to control the world. Being unimaginably rich and Jewish, the Rothschilds have been a magnet for conspiracy nuts. My favourite bonkers Rothschild conspiracy theory is that, not content with owning the Bank of England, between them Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his son Lionel fathered most of Queen Victoria’s children. I’d have thought they’d have had their hands full containing the weeds in the huge garden.

Lionel might not have cuckolded Prince Albert, but Victoria’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is believed to have asked him for a loan in the library of this house to buy shares in the Suez Canal. Disraeli had been the first Jewish MP, holding out for eleven years to take his seat in the House of Commons until the law had been changed to allow him to swear a modified non-Christian oath.

The history hits you from all sides, but ultimately it is people who create the narratives. It’s the mundane day-to-day lives of the small army of domestic workers who churned the butter in the kitchens, lovingly tended the grounds and groomed the horses in the ruined stables propped up by scaffolding in a shady corner where I watched a robin redbreast sing from the aluminium security fencing.

The 1881 Census records thirty-three servants residing at Gunnersbury, including George Bundy the head coachman, his wife and three children; William Cole the coachman from my home town of High Wycombe; Fanny South the domestic servant; Elizabeth Kilby the kitchen maid; and Emily D’Aranda, one of three nurses. I wonder what memories they had of Gunnersbury Park.

The green space is huge, and littered with crumbling boathouses and stone follies. The remains of a Gothic building stand just over shoulder-high, ivy-draped with thick branches rising from the soil like the muscles of the Green Man himself, Pan reaching out to reclaim the structure for the earth and restore the natural order. Kids run around with ice cream-smeared faces. I hear the clatter of studs on a concrete path by the cricket pitch as a batsman makes his way from the squat pavilion out to the crease. You could easily spend the day here in what Maxwell calls ‘London’s Wonderland’, but I need to push on to reach Hounslow Heath by sunset.

I emerge from Gunnersbury Park under the M4 flyover on the A4 Great West Road. Facing me are the Brompton Folding Bicycle Factory and the Sega Europe HQ. A huge image of Sonic the Hedgehog flies overhead like an avatar of the Sky God.

The Great West Road rises in central London and scoots along Fleet Street, following the path of the Roman road that headed west from Newgate bound for the health resort at Aquae Sulis (Bath). It’s been suggested – in my imagination by a man with a beard wearing sandals – that this section of the road follows an ancient ley line and the Romans merely built along a pre-existing trackway. There could be something in this theory as the route takes you past the Neolithic sites of West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill, places that are over 5,000 years old. It’s an interesting revision of the idea of the Romans as great innovators into a new role as conservationists.

The ancient trackways have been described as the ‘green roads of England’, but there’s nothing green about this particular passage of the A4 built in the 1920s. The new Great West Road horrified Gordon S. Maxwell, ‘This arterial horror sears the face of rural Middlesex,’ he declaimed. I have a vision of him in tweeds standing by the roadside angrily waving his walking stick at the vehicles trundling past in a futile protest at the onward march of the motor age.

I’d read a letter in the Hounslow, Heston and Whitton Chronicle from a man who’d worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company on the Great West Road, manufacturing ‘highly secret components for the war effort’. Steel rings produced here ended up inside the Enigma code-breaking machines at Bletchley Park, ultimately hastening the end of the Second World War.

This part of the road was known as the Golden Mile due to the concentration of big-name manufacturers. There were Smith’s crisps, Gillette razor blades, Beecham’s pharmaceuticals, Firestone tyres, Maclean’s toothpaste, Currys electrical goods and Coty cosmetics, illuminated by a ‘kinetic sculpture’ of a Lucozade bottle pouring neon orange liquid into a glass. It was like a Sunset Strip for factories.

This was the centre of a new 20th-century consumerism. British companies seizing the era of mass production and advertising, and American corporations branching into the European market spearheaded their campaigns from this stretch of tarmac through Brentford.

Art deco was the dominant architectural style that captured the mood of the moment, led by the practice of Wallis, Gilbert and Partners. Their crowning glory was the Hoover Building on the Western Avenue, now a branch of Tesco. They did for art deco in London what Banksy has done for graffiti. Commissioned to build factories they produced artworks that outlived the industries they were erected to house.

I now approached another of their signature constructions, Wallis House, originally built for Simmonds Aerocessories, which sits at the centre of what Barratt Homes are calling the Great West Quarter or GWQ. The new-build elements of the development look as though they’ve been more inspired by post-war East German social housing than the art deco masterpiece that looms over the grey blocks named after the factories of the Golden Mile. Like much of East Germany, the place is deserted.

From the moment I gazed through the window of the Sales and Marketing Suite at the scale model of the ‘premier development scheme in Brentford’, I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be welcome inside. I go in anyway and half-consider posing as a potential buyer, but my current look as an out-of-work Status Quo roadie gives the game away before I can even start my spiel.

‘I’m writing a book …’ I say, thinking this must convey some sort of respectability, but don’t get much further.

There is light jazz playing softly and a clean-cut corporate vibe is sucking up the oxygen. The immaculately dressed young man behind the desk repeats the word ‘book’ like someone mispronouncing the name of the aforementioned King Cnut. He’s on to me straight away and probably could have composed my previous paragraph for me in advance. I’ve got ‘long-term renter and ex-squatter’ written through me like a stick of rock and he probably works on commission.

We silently acknowledge the gulf between our worlds and attempt to make small talk. He tells me all the flats are sold, but not much else. I wish him well and skulk off back towards the Great West Road with the Barratt Homes flags fluttering in the pollution like the standards of a conquering army. I spot the first signs of civilian life, a child circling the empty car park on a scooter; it reminds me of images of Midwestern trailer parks, isolated and forgotten.

The large block next to the GWQ still awaits its Cinderella moment. The ivy has started to wind its way around the concrete and steel frame, the lower loading bay has flooded, possibly from the brook that gives Brook Lane running down one side its name. The New England Bar and Restaurant on the corner is boarded-up and fly-tipped. It reeks of the foul stench of decomposition.

A scene from an early Sid James Ealing Comedy, The Rainbow Jacket, was shot in this street. For the filming, a prop-built post-box was placed on the street corner. Some residents mistook this for the Royal Mail acknowledging the long walk to the main post office and dropped off their letters. But at the end of the day the celluloid letterbox was loaded into a van and driven away, with the mail dispatched at the post office.

I’ve been jungle trekking in Thailand and have explored the vast Niah Caves in Sarawak, but this walk along the A4 felt like the hardest slog yet. After sucking in car fumes for a couple of miles I crossed the River Brent and was sorely tempted to jump in. With my head starting to spin and the exhaust gases shimmering on the asphalt horizon, the scene started to resemble the classic Western movie moment when the cowboy is lost in the desert, vultures circling overhead, except in my case it’s jumbo jets coming in to land at Heathrow.

Standing in the shadow of the boarded-up Gillette Building, which is preparing for a new life as a swanky hotel, I decide I can take no more of this road walking. I’ve tried to conjure up images of the Neolithic trackway, of Romans heading off on holiday, of stagecoaches and open fields, but all I see is a blur of high-performance automobiles. It’s incredible that anything manages to live here, but where soil has blown into gaps in the concrete and tarmac a diverse ecology of roadside plants flourishes. The organisms we brand as weeds soak up the toxins of the man-made world, even managing to sprout the odd flower to lure in pollinating insects. People somehow inhabit proud inter-war villas lining the kerbside of the type that George Orwell described as ‘rows and rows of prison cells’, their net curtains stained carbon-monoxide grey.

This road has chalked up quite a death rate since it was opened, somewhere in excess of the Falklands War and the Afghanistan campaign combined – all in the pursuit of pushing London further westwards. Even in the 1940s the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Mr H. Alker Tripp, described road death rates in London as having reached ‘battle level’ – and he said that during the Second World War.

Gordon S. Maxwell proposed his own radical solution – ‘Hang a motorist for murder!’ He justified this position by pointing out that within ten years of the opening of the new Great West Road, drivers had killed more people than the highwaymen had managed in over 200 years. At this stage I’m tempted to follow his line of reasoning. ‘A gibbet, duly loaded, by the side of the Great West Road to-day would be more effective, I think, in stopping these murderers than some quite inadequate fine.’ With the speeds of modern drivers they would barely register the dangling corpse of a White Van Man, or if they did it would cause another accident as they attempted to grab a picture of it on their iPhone.

Gillette Corner marks the end of the Golden Mile and I feel like I’ve paid due homage to the fading art deco neon strip – the lights on the four faces of the Gillette clock tower would struggle to raise even a blink in their current state. The main function of Sir Banister Fletcher’s redbrick temple at present is to offer

a meaningful challenge to intrepid urban explorers whilst a ‘development solution’ is sought.

I cross Syon Lane, a name so laden with various ancient meanings I should have known opportunity was approaching. In Sanskrit syon means ‘followed by good luck’, and the turning for Wood Lane that followed presented itself to me at the ideal time. Despite winding off away from Hounslow Heath it would take me towards the village of Wyke Green snugly submerged in suburbia.

Yards away from the A4 and the predominant sound is of birdsong, hedgerows bursting with anthems as if there were competing avian hordes of football fans in full voice. ‘Sing us your best song,’ the starlings taunt the thrushes, whilst the blackbirds know they’ve got it all sown up and launch into full-throttle renditions of the early-evening roosting chorus.

A group of teenage lads play in the nets of Wycombe House Cricket Club. I played on this ground once when I was their age, when coming out here from the Buckinghamshire village where I grew up felt like a voyage into the city. What was urban to me then now possesses all the charms of a rural retreat away from the ‘blood and ugliness’ of the Great West Road.

The sports ground sits on the site of the old manor house, which became part of a chain of private lunatic asylums spread across West London in the 19th century. Wyke House was at one point run by Reginald Hill, who pioneered the practice of non-restraint treatment of mental illness, the enlightened idea that the psychiatrically impaired didn’t need to be chained to a wall. At his asylums the patients dined together and lived a relatively civilized existence in the fields of Hanwell, Brentford and Isleworth.

This was a time when ‘trading in lunacy’ was big business, a convenient way to dispense of a troublesome wife. You could buy a diagnosis of insanity for less than a divorce. The doctors were condemned as quacks and ‘nostrum mongers’. The Irish novelist Rosina Bulwer Lytton was confined to Wyke House by her husband, the politician and novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is now best known through phrases he used that have become well-worn clichés. ‘The great unwashed’, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ and the classic opening line, ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ all came from his feathered quill.

You can judge which was the greater crime, but his serial infidelity that led to their separation, then denying his wife access to their children and finally having her committed to an asylum because she heckled him at a political meeting don’t look too good. Fortunately, a public outcry in support of Rosina, which even attracted the attention of Karl Marx, meant she was released from Wyke Green after a month.

It is Edward Bulwer-Lytton who appears to have been the one with the troubled mind, seeking cures for various maladies, taking on leeches and potions and hydropathic treatments. His influential novel Zanoni drew on the Rosicrucian quest for the Elixir of Life and centred round a theme of divine madness.

A later science fiction work, Vril or The Coming Race, published in 1871, describes a subterranean master-race that has access to a powerful source of universal energy known as vril. Occultists and conspiracists took Bulwer-Lytton’s writings as fact and various secret societies claimed him as their own. There is a persistent belief that a Vril Society existed in pre-war Berlin, whose members included SS head Heinrich Himmler, Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Goering, and Party Chancellery head Martin Bormann. It’s alleged that the Vril Society urged the Nazis to embark on a global quest for ancient artefacts such as the Ark of the Covenant, which it believed could contain the key to the source of vril, and that the Society helped to design the Luftwaffe’s failed ‘flying saucer’ project under the guidance of extraterrestrials.

In the year that The Coming Race was published, Rosina authored Where There’s a Will There’s a Way and Chumber Chase. I’ve found it difficult to discover what they were about, probably because her writings didn’t inspire a genocidal regime and end up as the subject of a documentary on the History Channel.

I sit and revive myself, absorbing the view westwards across farmland. With the early-evening sun on my face, the songbirds and the distant ring of leather on willow, it’s almost a picture-postcard pastoral scene – wedged between a major death road and the M4 motorway. Maxwell cautioned that the bucolic nature of the area was under threat in the 1930s but perhaps the building of the roads has helped preserve it. Now you have an express route into the ‘real’ countryside, why bother with Wyke Green?

The path across Wyke Green

Maxwell noted the flavour of ‘bygone times’ hereabouts and reported how a friend had told him that one of the last bare-knuckle prize-fights had taken place on the green where I was now recovering from being floored by the traffic. Bare-knuckle boxing must have survived in the area as I later read about ex-fighter turned pro-golfer ‘Gypsy Joe’ Smith from Wyke Green, who won the London Heavyweight Unlicensed Boxing Championship at Osterley. Wyke Green sits on the edge of Osterley Park.

The golf course where Joe learnt to play is home to a circular Neolithic earthwork, absorbed into the contours of the course. A miss-hit drive could end up back in the Bronze Age.

I now have just over an hour to reach Hounslow Heath if I want to explore it in the light. I follow the footpath that cuts through a field of young wheat. Legend has it that the wheat produced in this area was so fine it was used to bake Elizabeth I’s bread.

Looking south from here the spire of a church pokes above the rooftops. Low-hanging horse chestnut trees are in full bloom. There are bluebells growing among the stinging nettles and the hawthorns are heavy with their May blossoms. In Celtic mythology hawthorn, also known as May Tree, is where the Little People hang out, waylaying unwary travellers. Maybe that explains my extended rest within the grove on Wyke Green. The workaday world of London life feels far away from here, faery magic temporarily transporting me to a different realm of time. A lad sprawled across the path supping a can of Tennent’s Super and chatting loudly on his phone relocates me to the digital age and so I push on.

This now feels like a country walk. I skirt the edge of Osterley Park, which I had tentatively planned to visit. Osterley is maintained by the National Trust so I imagine that it has preserved its aristocratic trappings. The house earns its keep as a film location, convenient for London-based crews. It’s starring as Batman’s mansion, Wayne Manors, in The Dark Knight Rises, but has also passed for Buckingham Palace in Young Victoria and scored credits in Horrible Histories and The Chuckle Brothers.

The manor houses and mansions form a line through West London now marked by the major roads – Chiswick, Gunnersbury, Boston Manor, Syon Park, Osterley, Strawberry Hill. This part of West London seems to have had the same relationship to the demi-monde and fashionable society of the 18th and 19th centuries that Buckhurst Hill and Chigwell have with Premier League footballers and reality TV stars today. In two hundred years’ time will people be visiting the Brentwood gaff of Amy Childs, looking at mock-ups of her signature vajazzles and fine collection of weaves hung out like American Indian scalps?

The last hangers-on from the world of powdered wigs and miserable marriages were swept away when the ‘age of mobility’ demanded better and faster roads to ease the city-centre congestion. Motorways were built to ‘by-pass the by-passes’, such as the Great West Road, in a grand vision of modern London outlined in The County of London Plan, written in 1943. The M4 careered through the grounds of Osterley Park, leaving it to serve up cream teas and play a supporting role as a backdrop in period dramas. There was a certain democratizing zeal to the early days of the road-building craze, however misguided we might view it now. It also bequeathed us the legacy of these peculiar lands trapped between highways and somehow suspended outside time. That might explain why so many episodes of Doctor Who were shot in the area.

I follow the path in a happy daze, guided by a tower block marking the location of Heston, into an overgrown meadow of cow parsley and blackberry bushes. A group of Asian kids, giddy on Lambrini, jump to their feet and brush themselves down as I approach. Grazing horses saunter over the uneven clods of grass. This is a rare slice of remote London.

The exit from the field is through a hole in a hedge that dumps me on an over-active B-road. Brushing hawthorn flowers from my hair, it’s as if I’ve dropped in from another era rather than skipped across from Wyke Green. This farmer is clearly no friend of the Ramblers and I can’t blame him – they don’t so much walk as organize mobile conversations.

This is now the final approach into Hounslow Heath, across the terrain where Maxwell wrote of getting lost when the fields of Heston were built over in the inter-war years. He’d returned to the area to take a friend on a ‘country stroll’: ‘When I knew this walk it was pleasant field-paths, shaded by noble elms, as rural a ramble as the heart could desire, but now it is all bricks and mortar and new roads all exactly alike.’ I pick up one of Maxwell’s field paths I’d read about on the train. It leads me behind gardens of smoky BBQs and backyard water-fights over the Great West Road into Lampton.

I’d heard of Heston because of its famous motorway service station that serves cracking 24-hour fry-ups. Lampton on the other hand was virgin ground, a medieval hamlet hanging on in the suburbs. Cutting across Lampton Park there is more cricket, but this time an informal occasion with only half the players wearing whites. I ask the lad at long-on who’s playing and he tells me with a smile that it’s just a ‘friends’ match’.

Charles Dickens was apparently very fond of Lampton and often visited Lampton Hall. There are certain associations that any self-respecting London suburb will try to claim – a pub where Dick Turpin hid out, any kind of link to Dickens and a brush with royalty. Hounslow ticks all these boxes convincingly with a great big fat marker pen. I don’t doubt that Dickens sojourned in this park; I fancy loitering a while myself and sit down next to the path to admire a great chunk of sandstone.

Lampton Sarsen stone

I read the plaque beside the Sarsen stone as kids whizz past me on scooters. The gist is that the rock was formed from a bed of sand that lay beneath the sea covering this area around 50 million years ago. There’s a number to get your head around – Dickens coming out here 130-odd years ago I can cope with, but 50 million years ago and Hounslow part of a great sea? The sandstone gradually worked its way nearer the surface to rest on the London Clay about half a million years ago before it was excavated from a gravel pit.

The land submerged in water, then large beasts roaming the wild forests are sobering thoughts when looking across at children playing, gaggles of gossiping teenage girls and lads passing a ball around. This world we hold so dear is transient and there will come a time when all that is left of Lampton is this lump of archaic sandstone, and possibly the plaque.

I pass through a tunnel beneath the Piccadilly Line and into a clichéd landscape of outer London suburbia. An old lady watches me from her chair in a glass porch. There are bricks stacked in the front garden of the house next door waiting to be transformed into an extension. Tomorrow the men will emerge to wash their cars on the drive. The planes bound for Heathrow almost skim the chimney tops on their descent.

Only now do I realize that I haven’t stopped for food since the café in Gunnersbury Park and have run out of water. But as an experienced suburban survivor I know how to source provisions in this seemingly barren landscape. I nip into the corner shop and bag a samosa and a can of Stella Artois.

With provisions for the onward journey I turn into Staines Road. The evocative images painted so vividly by Walter George Bell in Where London Sleeps loom back into view. This was one of the principal old coaching roads and the Middlesex section of the Roman road Via Trinobantes (better known as Stane Street) that passed through Pontes (Staines) on its way to the great town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester in Hampshire). It is along the pavement here that the gibbets would have decorated the roadside with their putrid drooping cadavers of highwaymen and footpads.

A highway robbery was reported in the Hounslow Chronicle in 2011 when three masked men leapt from a car and snatched a backpack containing cash and jewellery from two men ‘oriental in appearance’. Aside from the use of a dark green car as the getaway vehicle, this could have been a crime from a different age. Perhaps Claude Duval or Galloping Dick slipped through a tear in the space–time continuum and then landed back in the 18th century with a stash of worthless bank notes.

This robbery lacks the class of the crimes committed by Old Mob the Highwayman, who also appeared in a double act known as Hawkins and Simpson (I bet they argued over whose name came first). Once when Old Mob robbed a stagecoach on Hounslow Heath he consoled the victims with a ‘story in verse’, earning himself the moniker of ‘the poetical highwayman’. He also held up the coach of the Duchess of Portsmouth, who stupidly used the ‘Do you know who I am?’ line. Old Mob treated this with the contempt that a bouncer on the door of Bungalow 8 shows to a Z-list celebrity trying to gain entry using the same refrain. He told her to pay up because he was the King of Hounslow Heath and needed money as much as the other king. He even had the front to rob the feared Judge Jeffreys, a man known as the ‘hanging judge’. Jeffreys thought mentioning his name would earn him a pardon; instead it led to a very long lecture on morals and ethics from the pistol-toting Old Mob, rounded off by ‘thundering a volley of foul oaths’. The judge duly delivered his purse.

The highwaymen were the heroes of their day. They occupied the position we now reserve for footballers and X-Factor winners. They stuck two fingers up at authority and conducted themselves with a swagger and style that even Mick Jagger would be hard pushed to match.

Look at the exploits of Sixteen-String Jack, the original ‘dandy highwayman’, who earned his nickname from wearing ‘breeches with eight strings at each knee’. After being acquitted for a robbery on Hounslow Road early in his career, instead of keeping a low profile he headed straight to Bagnigge Wells near King’s Cross, the trendiest nightspot in Regency London. He strolled in dressed in a ‘scarlet coat, tambour waistcoat, white silk stockings, and a laced hat, and publicly declared himself to be “Sixteen-String Jack, the Highwayman”’.

Shortly before his final capture he attended a public execution at Tyburn. These were big occasions and positions at the front were at a premium, reserved for the most wealthy and famous. Jack pushed his way through the crowd and then entered the roped-off gallows area protected by the constables. He requested permission to stand upon the platform, observing to the assembled throng that ‘perhaps it is proper that I should be a spectator on this occasion.’

However flamboyant his public image, he was ultimately sentenced to death for stealing the measly sum of one shilling and sixpence from Princess Amelia’s doctor in Gunnersbury Park. The night before his execution he had a party with seven ladies in his cell and went to the scaffold in a ‘new suit of pea-green cloth, a ruffled shirt, and his breeches were, on this occasion, adorned with the usual sixteen strings – but this time they were of silver!’

Just before the Heath there is a plaque commemorating the fact that this was the entrance to ‘London Terminal Aerodrome Hounslow Heath’, from where the first commercial flights in Britain took off in 1919. That year a challenge was laid down by the Australian government, offering a prize of A£10,000 to the first Australian to fly from Great Britain to Australia within a period of thirty days. What followed was something akin to an episode of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines pursuing that pigeon.

Six aircraft took off from Hounslow Heath aiming to make the inaugural flight from Europe to Australia. The Sopwith Wallaby had a hell of a time, with the crew being imprisoned as Bolsheviks in Yugoslavia, suffering a cracked engine in Constantinople and finally crash-landing in Bali. The Alliance P.2 nose-dived into an orchard in Surbiton killing both crew-members. The Blackburn Kangaroo staggered its way across Europe before finally getting tangled in the fence of a mental hospital in Crete with the crew unhurt. The Martinsyde Type A crashed in the sea off Corfu. The Airco DH.9 did make it to Australia but took a monumental 206 days, picking up a consolation prize of A£1,000 and earning its captain the nickname of ‘Battling Ray’ Parer.

Only one aircraft successfully completed the challenge – a converted Vickers Vimy bomber captained by Ross Macpherson Smith. It travelled via fifteen locations before reaching Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory – a feat that will remain unequalled until Ryanair starts operating flights Down Under.

In 1920 London moved its airport to Croydon and the skies over the Heath remained peaceful for a few years, until a small airfield on the edge of the Hounslow by Heath Row was developed after the war to become one the busiest airports in the world. Passenger planes now buzzed down over the gorse bushes resplendent in bright yellow flowers at a rate of around one every ten minutes. I spot a Qantas jet arriving from Australia at the end of a flight of twenty-odd hours that the passengers will have found arduous. They should try travelling by Vickers Vimy next time.

Hounslow Heath matches the descriptions I’d read of an open scrubby land of low bushes and rough grasses. There are joggers and dog walkers, butterflies and moths flitting between the sand spurrey and brambles. What was dubbed ‘bad land’ by William Cobbett on his Rural Rides is now a treasured public open space.

This last remainder of lowland heath with its acid grasses and dwarf gorse is a vital habitat that maintains many plant and insect species rare in the London area. The bees, beetles, spiders, ring ouzels, red-backed shrikes and honey buzzards that make their homes here are a vital component of the world that also produced the Great West Quarter and the Sainsbury Local soon to open over the road.

Following the winding pathways just before sunset the smell of hawthorn is there again. I’d happily be accosted here by the faery folk. There is a lusty rendition of the evening nesting call from a gregarious portion of some of the 132 bird species that have been recorded amongst the bell heather, silver birch and pedunculate oak.

Two lovers canoodle on a bench; she brushes her hair over her face as I pass. A rabbit skips across the path in front of me. When my grandfather courted my nan he would catch rabbits for her by throwing his hat over them. That was the way to a country girl’s heart in the inter-war years, at the time that Bell and Maxwell wrote the books that guided me out this way.

I rest on a bench perched upon a mound almost in line with the approach run into Heathrow. I take a late tea of Stella and samosa, and survey the heath from this raised aspect. I try to evoke images and moods of the past life of this landscape – attempt to tune into its stories. People have lived in Hounslow for millennia – it’s an area of prehistoric settlement.

Hounslow Heath

Labourers working on the heath in 1864 uncovered a set of Iron Age figurines that gives us a glimpse into the world of the people who made their homes here. The ‘Hounslow Hoard’ consists of three small bronze boars, two other dog-like animals and a model wheel, possibly suggestive of some sort of solar cult.

The boar motif was popular in pre-Roman Britain, being found in tumuli around Colchester, on a shield in Lincolnshire and on numerous Celtic coins. One reading of the fascination with boars, according to Miranda Green, is that they represented ‘strength, ferocity and invincibility in a war-orientated heroic society’. On the other hand they might have been made by a craftsman who just happened to like boars and the two other animals were his failed attempts at dogs. Until we discover the secret of time travel we’ll never be completely sure.

An Iron Age village was excavated where the planes now skid across the airport tarmac of Runway One. A complex pattern of hut circles was unearthed alongside the remnants of a shrine or temple, implying that this might well have been the religious centre of the region. Where people came to worship in time immemorial, today they ascend into the sky.

The antiquarian William Stukeley believed that he had found a camp built by Julius Caesar on the heath during his campaign against the Britons. The gunpowder for one of the first cannon used in Europe, at Crécy in 1346, was made on Hounslow Heath, part of a military association that continues through medieval tournaments and pageants, the Civil War, RAF raids against First World War Zeppelins to the barracks that are still present. This is just a sample of the rich history associated with these 200 acres of scrubland.

As a map-illiterate walker, the fact that most tickled me was that it was across the heath that the base line for the first triangle of Britain’s original Ordnance Survey map was laid in 1784. The basis for all our modern maps was created across Hounslow Heath, a place now largely overlooked and ‘off-the-map’.

I continue my lap of the space in high spirits as I’d reached the end of the trek with my left knee still functioning. A ghostly, pale, gap-toothed lad approaches me from a stand of coppiced trees and asks for directions to the ‘forty acres’. I tell him I haven’t a clue but offer up my 1975 Greater London Atlas for reference. He takes a quick look, says thanks and heads off into the sunset. The Ordnance Survey had now become more of use to a pair of aimless wanderers than the military that General William Roy intended it for.

I think back to Maxwell’s story of the Nine Muses and contrast it with the world around me. Perhaps Maxwell found some magic mushrooms that morning in the ‘forty acres’ where the pallid lad was heading. Instead of following him to find out I slope back to the Staines Road. I considered a pint in The Hussar to round off the trip but as I was trying to work out if it was full of lagered-up squaddies a No. 237 bus pulled up bound for Brentford. Riding a 21st-century stagecoach along the old coaching road is a far better way to depart the scene.

From the top deck full of Saturday-night people I look out for ‘ripening gallows fruit’ and ‘dandy highwaymen’. But all I see are waddling girls with Tesco bags and boys in caps and hoodies bouncing along past ‘For Sale’ signs on new-build apartments. Whether they realize it or not, in their hands they hold Maxwell’s magic cord that connects our universe of iPhones and Nando’s to boar-worshippers and mad men in their flying machines and ‘passes over the old-time Heath of Hounslow’.